Since a few months, we have been publishing a separate "Highlights" summary. Please consider helping non-English-language communities to stay updated, by providing a translation: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_March_2012Many thanks to those who translated last month's "Highlights" into Danish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch and (partially) Arabic.

(Financial information is only available for February 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 - February 29, 2012.

Revenue $30,198,838 *Expenses:* Technology Group $6,623,737 Community/Fundraiser Group $3,042,089 Global Development Group $2,707,697 Governance Group $641,421 Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group $4,027,709 Total Expenses $17,042,652 Total surplus/(loss) $13,156,186

* Revenue for the month is $824K vs plan of $272K, approximately $552K or 203% over plan.

* Year-to-date is $30.2MM vs plan of $24.6MM, approximately $5.6MM or 21% over plan.

* Expenses for the month is $2.1MM vs plan of $2.2MM, approximately $49K or 2% lower than plan.

* Year-to-date is $17MM vs plan of $18.9MM, approximately $1.9MM or 10% lower than plan.

* Cash position is $31.4MM as of February 29, 2012 – approximately 13 months of expenses.

== Highlights ==

=== MediaWiki development switching to distributed revision control === The MediaWiki code repository was converted from Subversion to Git (a distributed version control system originally developed by Linus Torvalds and others for the Linux kernel) for the MediaWiki core and for those MediaWiki extensions that are in use on WMF sites. The expected improvements <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/15/wikimedia-engineering-moving-from-subversion-to-git/> are: A lower barrier for contributing code, avoiding certain technical flaws of Subversion that made life difficult for developers, and getting improvements to users faster.

=== Design improvements for Wikipedia mobile === The beta version of the mobile Wikipedia site saw several changes <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/26/wikipedia-mobile-gets-a-face-lift/> to achieve a more professional look and a better user experience. These include changes to the footer, a cleaner design for revealing and hiding sections, and a redesigned full-screen search. An experimental new feature makes it easier to access reference footnotes.

== Technology ==

A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for March 2012 can be found at:

* *Ashburn data center* — We completed the Squid to Varnish conversion for image caching, and successfully deployed Varnish on 8 servers in our Ashburn data center for about half a day. Where there are currently 24 Squid servers, 8 varnish servers would provide sufficient capacity to replace them. We are making good progress in testing, preparing and bringing up the Ashburn Search clusters. Full scale testing has just started and results have been quite promising. The Ashburn data center added network peering, and we peered over 10 other big sites/ISPs with our network shortly after that, thus reducing latency especially to Europe, Japan and Hong Kong for many of our users there (and reducing bandwidth costs).

* *Media Storage* — After addressing earlier issues with the Swift deployment, it was re-deployed and has been stable since. The original testing hardware was removed from the cluster and the final production node was added to bring a total of 5 new Swift nodes to be the thumbnails object store at Tampa. Swift is also now running in the Labs environment and ready to be used by other Labs projects that interact with Swift in production. Volunteer attention to the Swift Labs cluster is welcome to improve monitoring, analyze the configuration, and in any other way understand this component of our infrastructure better.

=== Features Engineering === * *Visual editor* — A big decision in March was to move forward with contentEditable (CE) instead of implementing our own Editable Surface (ES). Work continued on Parsoid and the team created a dump grepper with syntax highlighting, and used it to analyze existing wikilink/image syntax use.

* *Page Triage* — This month, the new editor engagement team developed the first prototype of Page Triage, which provides an enhanced list of articles to be triaged by community patrollers. Current goals for this project are to complete development of the list view in April, and start development of advanced features like the zoom view, for release in May.

=== Internationalization and Editor Engagement Experimentation === * *Internationalization and localization tools'* — The team started to develop (with UI/UX contractors) the UI for a Universal language selector for desktop and mobile. They also added keymaps for language support to Narayam, added Lohit font updates from upstream to WebFonts, fixed bugs, reviewed code for localization support in MediaWiki 1.19, and discussed language support metrics.

* *Editor Engagement Experimentation* — The newly created, cross-functional Editor Engagement Experimentation team will focus on engineering for experimentation around strategies to reverse stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia projects, and will effectively launch on April 16. It will be composed of people from the Community and Engineering/Product departments, tasked specifically with conducting small, rapid experiments designed to improve editor retention. This is intended to go beyond the projects that are already being worked on; the purpose of /this/ team will be to identify the possible changes we don't yet know about. The engineering team will report to Alolita Sharma, with two new software developer positions to be hired in the current fiscal year.

=== Mobile === * *Mobile Frontend* — We deployed changes to the MobileFrontend extension to make it less Wikimedia-centric, as well as persistent cookie support for options to beta. We also started to develop the newly revised full screen search, footer & the new collapsible sections.

* *Mobile Photo Upload* — The first set of basic wireframes for mobile uploads was created, with final language reviewed by the legal team.

* *Kiwix UX initiative* — The team decided not to use Mozilla Gecko as the platform to port Kiwix to Android; an alternative is cordova-qt. Work continued on Kiwix 0.9 RC1, the largest release ever made for Kiwix. New ZIM files are regularly released for offline reading using Kiwix. In particular, for the first time, a full ZIM version of the English Wikipedia was made available, containing about 4 million articles, 11 million redirects, and 300,000 math images (see online demo <http://library.kiwix.org:4229/A/Calculus.html>).

=== Platform Engineering === * *MediaWiki 1.19* — We have now finished deploying MediaWiki 1.19 to all Wikipedia sites, including the Chinese language wikis (zh*). However, we are monitoring some post-deploy issues. We are keeping an eye on site performance; there's been a slight regression in our parser cache hit rate.

* *Summer of Code 2012* — We submitted the our application for Google Summer of Code 2012 (GSoC), which was accepted by Google.

=== Community Organizing Projects === * Steven Walling and Maryana Pinchuk, joined by Megan Hernandez and Victor Grigas, completed an intensive tour of Brazil, holding editor meet-ups focused on knowledge-sharing, discussion and debate in four cities: Sao Paolo, Rio, Natal, and Curitiba http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/22/brazil-meetups-march/. Approximately 25 active Portuguese editors showed up for the São Paulo convening, making it the biggest convening ever held in Brazil. [1] Oona Castro has taken on the continuation of this work to keep the PT community engaged in positive change. [2] * Karyn Gladstone, Ryan Faulkner, Maryana Pinchuk, and Steven Walling -- with the help of Dario Taraborelli -- have begun building a backlog of community and product experiments for the new Editor Engagement Experiments (E3) team as they make the transition from Community into Product.

=== Fundraising === * Joined the editor convenings in Brazil and Argentina to learn about Portuguese and Spanish editors to find stories for the 2012 annual campaign. Held focus groups with donors to gain a deeper understanding of the international donor base to improve localization of fundraising messaging, donation methods and forms to optimize the campaign internationally. Collaborated with chapter members in Brazil and Argentina on improvements to make for the next campaign. * Interviewed 20 new editors for possible 2012 fundraiser appeals. * Completed the 2011 Fundraiser report, which will be released shortly. * The team participated in a hands-on Mingle training to sync up project management tools and develop work flows in accordance to overall strategy.

=== Fellowship Program === * *WikiWomen’s History Month* o Sarah Stierch worked with volunteers to coordinate the first WikiWomen's History Month in March.[1] In honor of International Women's Day and Women's History Month and part of gender gap outreach efforts, meetups and edit-a-thons were held around the world. Wrap-up documentation is in progress.[2][3] o WMF hosted the San Francisco WikiWomen's History Edit-a-Thon in partnership with OCLC and the Ada Initiative. Over 40 attendees (mostly women and a good mix of experienced and new editors) created 10 new articles and improved 20 more. 12 new editor accounts were created at the event.[4][5] * *Teahouse Project* - The Teahouse has been live on English Wikipedia for one month.[6] With much community interest in the project since launch, the team has been working with volunteers to clarify and improve the process for answering questions in the Q&A forum and becoming a Teahouse host. Nine new hosts have volunteered and been added to the program, and several other experienced editors are informally participating. Some relevant metrics from the project’s first month include: o About 30 new editors are participating in the Teahouse each week, with an average of 6 new questions and 4 new guest profiles created per day.[7] 61% of guests return to the Teahouse more than once, with an average of 3 visits per new editor to our Q&A forum. 26% of guests ask multiple questions. Most questions are answered within a few hours, and hosts clearly have capacity to handle more new editors in the forum than we’re bringing in with current outreach methods. We’re brainstorming ways to let more new editors know about the Teahouse. o Although sample size is still very small and it’s too early to draw conclusions about the Teahouse’s impact on editor retention, initial data shows that 12% of all new editors invited to the Teahouse and 38% of all new editors who participate in the Teahouse are still active on Wikipedia 2-4 weeks later, compared with only 7% from a similar uninvited control group. o We’re wrapping up a survey of 150 new editors to learn more about their Teahouse experience. 86% of respondents are satisfied or very satisfied with the answers they received in the Teahouse. More details will be in the full first month’s report on meta, still in progress.[8] o *Recruitment* - New fellowships will be announced in April - stay tuned for upcoming announcements!

* Oona Castro engaged as consultant, Brazil programs * Dan Foy joins the Global Development Team as Mobile Technical Manager * Barry travels with Moushira Elamrawy to Cairo, Beirut and Amman to meet with volunteers and partners in the Arabic-speaking region; speak about Wikimedia * Kul and Amit attend the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to announce partnership with Telenor

* São Paulo: Attended by many community members; São Paulo community seems most engaged with forming the Brazilian Chapter and offline activities. * Curitiba: 5 community members attended and engaged in a discussion about editing and community behaviour, including Daniela and Fabio (creator of Wikilove on PT.WP). * Rio: Attended by 14 Editors (including participants from Brasilia and Natal), editors had strong feelings about deletionism vs. inclusionism, one editor is engaged in a project to improve Wikipedia: [2] <http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Esplanada/geral/T%C3%B3picos,_encontros_no_Brasil_(15mar2012)>, [3] <http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usu%C3%A1rio:Chicocvenancio/projeto> * Natal: A few attendees from Natal and Salvador had a lot of questions about WMF operations.

==== Engagement with the community ==== * Editing Wikimedia and Meta pages in the projects of the community: sharing ideas and proposals * Meetings and email exchanges with Everton and other volunteers (Nevio, Jonas, Rodrigo and a few others) on partnerships and events (Balaio Hacker, WikiBrasil, Workshops in Casa Fora do Eixo, partnership with IPEA and others)

==== Communications, Brazil ==== Positive media stories on the increased focus on Brazil. Media has focused on engagement of Oona with the Wikimedia Foundation. She is trying to refocus attention on the community.

==== Brazil Education Program ==== * Discussions on targets, aims, methodologies and solutions for upcoming ‘problems’ (such as the removal of mandatory activities on Wikipedia from one of Juliana’s class). * Meeting in São Paulo with professors and campus ambassadors (professors interested in engaging the project)

* Global Development team (Barry and Moushira) visit to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco (see blog post <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/06/arabic-regional-visit-encourages-contribution/> and the general "Highlights" section above) * New outreach materials are ready to print next week. * Barry spoke at the Columbia University Middle East Research Center in Amman and then at the ArabNet Digital Summit in Beirut * Moushira conducted introductory training for NGOs in the region at e-Mediate conferences in Jordan and Morocco

=== Mobile and Business Development === * The Mobile Team attended Mobile World Congress (which was February 27 to March 1st) where the team did the following: 1) Announce the Wikipedia Zero partnership with Telenor at the event; 2) meet with other potential partners regarding our mobile programs; and 3) evangelize the benefits of supporting our mission activities with a wider audience. Kul Wadhwa also spoke on a panel at the conference about Innovation in Developing Countries where he emphased the importance of providing "access" to people in these countries [10] <http://www.mobileworldlive.com/videos/day-two-panel-innovation-in-developing-markets/22803> * Dan Foy joined the Global Development team as our Technical Manager for Mobile Partnerships. He will primarily be working with our partners on implementing our programs, such as Wikipedia Zero and Wikipedia on USSD/SMS, so more people will have access to free knowledge on mobile devices. * Working on launch setups with Orange for free access to mobile Wikipedia (the m. site which includes images) starting with Ivory Coast, following by Uganda and Tunisia. * Approached the final testing phase of WP Zero with Digi (Telenor's affiliate in Malaysia).

=== Global development research === * Finally, the data from the December editor survey has been cleaned and processed. We'll start blogging soon. * The outreach evaluation tool is done, and we'll be delivering first report to the India team early next week. We are also coordinating with the teahouse team to implement the outreach tool for new editors. * Report for the Global Education team that compares editing patterns of students in the education program with newbie editors is done, and will be delivered to global education program soon. Survey results from Indian and US students who participated in the education program were shared with local teams. Currently, we are fielding a pre-test survey of students in the Cairo pilot. * Working with the analytics team we have data on editors by geography, and are creating heat maps to show distribution of editors for all languages, plus English, Portuguese, Arabic and Hindi Wikipedias.

=== Wikipedia Education Program === * Beta testing of the new MediaWiki extension: Software developer Jeroen DeDauw worked with volunteers on debugging the new MediaWiki extension for the Education Program. The extension will replace the current course page and Ambassadors on-wiki system and will add more transparency to the work being done in the Education Program. Beginning in fall 2012, professors, Ambassadors, and students will associate themselves with courses through a MediaWiki database, which will help with managing the courses and tracking the students' work on Wikipedia and will significantly reduce staff workload. * Brazil Education Pilot kicks off with six classes: The Brazil Pilot started with 6 classes in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Local Brazilian Wikipedians led a training for the all-star cast of professors and Campus Ambassadors. Wikipedians across Brazil and Portugal are also expressing their support for the program by serving as Online Ambassadors. Topic areas this semester include Physics, Ancient History, Public Policy, and Sociology. * Annie Lin meets with instructors in Cairo: In mid-March, Annie Lin traveled to Cairo where she met with instructors participating in the Cairo Education Pilot as well as with students and local community members. Assignments this term: mathematics students are going to be writing articles on famous mathematicians, French students will be translating articles from the French Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia (their first topic is "Civil Disobedience"), and theatre/drama students will be adding the literature review section of their long analytical paper onto the Arabic Wikipedia. Some students find editing Wikipedia to be very technically challenging (they look forward to the visual editor!), but the participating professors and students are very excited to play a big role in growing free knowledge in Arabic. (http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/19/classes-start-in-cairo-pilot/ ) * Workshop with members of a Cairo photography club: Essam Sharaf conducted a workshop with members of the InFocus photography club in early March. Essam highlighted the lack of pictures on the Arabic Wikipedia and encouraged members of the club to actively contribute their photos to Wikimedia Commons. * Engagement of Faris El-Gwely as a contractor: Faris joined the Wikipedia Education Program team half-time as Education Program Coordinator, Cairo. Faris will help coordinate and monitor on-the-ground and on-wiki activities in the Cairo Pilot. A long-term Arabic Wikipedian, Faris lives in Sadat City near Cairo.

=== India Programs ===

==== Indic Languages ==== * *Medical project*: This is now running in Assamese, Oriya, Telugu and Malayalam. Supported the Assamese & Oriya communities by helping them with creating project pages and showing how the project can be managed effectively. We are now loooking at expanding the potential of this project by supporting commnities to conduct outreach sessions specifically focussed on this project - in medical colleges. Co-ordinating outreach sessions with Assamese and Nepali communities, and exploring potential in Telugu. * *Translated article enhancement project*: This project works on cleaning up content added using Google translation tools and is exciting becuase it has potential to help community collaboration and community building (attracting both newbies and retired ediotrs). In Kannada, a10 community members signed up for the project - and we helped prepare the project page, collect the required articles, drafted communication for the community and suggested starting a facebook group for kannada wikipedia. * *GLAM*: informed community members about the project and conducted a HIndi outreach session for staff at Craft Museum * *Wikisource*: Published blog post about DjVu digitization. Supported the Gujarati community community for the creation of GU Wikisource and supported the Telugu community to enable the sub page feature in TE Wikisource. * Others: o Kannada: Helped community to log bug for enabling transwiki import o Nepali: Medical outreach o Nepali: Support for creating Wikimedia mailing list o Bangla: Support for enabling proofread extension and the associated namespaces o Odiya: Supported outreach programs at Anugul, Bhubaneswar and Cuttack

==== India outreach and communications ==== * Conducted outreach sessions: Two at Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi), one each at Bharati Vidyapeeth's College of Engineering (Delhi), ISB (Hyderabad), Jamia Milia Islamia, Lady Shri Ram College and Jawaherlal Nehru University (Delhi) * Discussing the possibility of conducting outreach sessions: o *Medical outreach* in Assam, Andhra Pradesh to support the medicine project in Telugu and Assamese wikis o *Non-technical outreach*: Diversifying areas of interest to recruit new editors and reaching out to non-engineering non-software institutions o *Indian language outreach*: Community building for Hindi, two Indic language outreach events (Department of Hindi in Delhi University and JNU) * Improved new editor sign up form to capture details of participants attending outreach sessions. (Details from this form will be used to follow up with the participants and keep track of their editing post the session.) * Experimented to test effectiveness of online outreach by organising and conducting an online outreach event. * Initiatied support to community on Wikipatrika, the India community newsletter. * Started creating a contact mailing list of journalists and PR personnel. * Started exploring the full potential of social media for community building. * Got a press story for Hyderabad and a press contact for te-wp celebrations. * Story published in Caravan. * As part of Women's History Month, published a blog post on Netha Hussein <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/27/wiki-women-joining-indic-languages/>, a female editor on the Malayalam Wikipedia * Working on Storytelling: Gujarati Wikisource

=== Communications === A relatively quiet month for Communications in March. Jay spoke at the Public Relations World Congress in Dubai on a panel about social media and collaborative approaches to communications. Discussions about some possible expansion and improvements to the Wikimedia blog took place (more plans in development for April) and the Wikimedia Shop got its first major exposure to the Wikimedia community.

The Wikimedia Shop (http://shop.wikimedia.org/ ), under the management of James Alexander, has been getting lots of feedback from community members. New products are in development and work is underway on methods to keep purchase costs and shipping low for international customers. We're also proposing several methods of shipping free merchandise to global volunteers.

==== Major announcements ==== No major press releases or announcements in March

Encyclopedia Britannica announced it will stop printing editions after 244 years. The coverage was mostly neutral or positive, noting that Wikipedia is a remarkable achievement consistent with our digital age and open/croud-sourced information sharing.

Wikimedia Deutschland announced WikiData in late March, the first new Wikimedia project since 2006. The coverage was international and very positive, often highlighting the status of the trio of major donor/supporters.

Payroll accountability is now shared between HR and Finance, with Finance handling execution. We also completed a bi-annual exempt/non-exempt status audit and adjusted employee status where necessary so that we are in legal compliance. We are beginning to implement some leadership development programming, starting with monthly leadership roundtable discussions.

On the recruiting front, we have reduced hiring cycle time from nearly 1 year to 6 months on average, and we have a goal of reducing that to 3 months. Capacity to hire, particularly in tech, has grown enormously. We are improving the visibility of job postings, including on social media outlets, and will be improving our ability to better target specific markets in our recruiting efforts.

Policy Implementations

We extended the benefit to employees of our pe-tax commuter reimbursement policy. Under the new policy, commuter reimbursement benefits extend to public transportaiton, parking, carpooling, and bicycle commuting.

Upcoming Policy Work

We're working on a revision of both the paid time off policy and our policy on immigrations, namely sponsoring visas and green cards. Part of the intention in the paid time off policy is to address the perception of inequalities in the system by making paid time off based on length of employment. We have also grown to the size where having an immigration policy was necessary, and we are designing one that aligns to our values around welcoming an international workforce.

We have hired a new temporary paralegal, four summer interns, and hope to hire and announce a new junior counsel (with strong Wikimedia background) in April.

In light of recent Board resolutions on fundraising, we met in Berlin with chapters in France, the UK, and Germany to discuss minimum legal and finance requirements for fundraising; still need to schedule meeting with Switzerland.

In addition, our interns have posted a series of pieces of background research for the community: